To me, the key to eliminating this behaviour isn't having more bylaw enforcement. It's not more signage, more bus-media advertising. And as much as I applaud efforts such as 'Garbage Crawls', I don't believe that such efforts are the best way to approach the problem, no matter what degree of awareness and engagement they produce. (I'm rather reminded of the husband who's compelled to be loving and intimate with his wife every Valentine's Day or anniversary or birthday, being thoughtful and kind and making offerings and taking her out to dinner; is this really the best way to get him to see things differently, to steer him south-southwest three and a half degrees towards a more desirable intimacy default setting...?)
As with increased voter turnout, I don't view eradicating littering as a solitary end goal. Rather, if the notion of 'community engagement' is propagated in the correct way, then littering eventually disappears. But what you've actually accomplished in getting people more aware, more involved and more invested in their streets, their neighbourhoods, their communities goes well beyond keeping the place neat and tidy.
The great challenge here is that I'm not talking about a 'small victories' approach. (Again, however, I'm not dismissing community efforts to regularly clean up streets and parks, retail environments as well as open spaces.) I'm talking about something that ties into general behaviour, into motivations, into how people see the world...and their place in it.
I'm talking about lifestyle choices, I'm talking about value systems...about pride, about respect...about the very tenets of 'a life well-lived'.
No matter where I've lived since returning to Canada, I've picked up litter on a daily basis. In each situation, what was tossed to the ground has varied. So in each location, different culprits are at play. The most saddening situations are those where it's clearly children who are mindlessly littering. Others are easily identified as teenagers on the one hand, and adults on the other. I used to walk Battlefield Park, and would find detritus on the trails...even on the Bruce. I'll admit that I would often stand over an object and stare in disbelief, muttering 'You can't be serious...'
I've walked downtown streets in the past few months and made a point of being very 'aware' of litter. Making a point of 'seeing' it. Which actually requires some effort; we become inured to it, after a while 'tune it out', and otherwise ignore its effects. (And yet we can't. Subconsciously, its presence does impact us, poisoning our regard for where we are, little-by-little, instance-by-instance, until there's this 'malaise' going on, a negative program running in the background...) And there are times when I go through a process akin to Kübler-Ross's 'Five Stages of Grief': acknowledgement, disbelief, frustration, anger, resignation. And within that process, there's some kind of reconciliation with its existence, and in a confined mental space I enclose the circumstances and reasons for it being there.
'Surely the residents care,' I'll want to think. But then I have to remind myself of certain truths: that if as a visitor you're oblivious to your surroundings, surely if you're a resident, it's much worse. Over time you stop noticing and stop caring.
And of course, it's an endless cycle. You stop caring, the inner anger rises, you express your frustration by not caring (littering), you care less, you litter more...
Adding to this is the realiy that nobody wants to clean up after someone else. So few pedestrians make the effort to pick up the errant piece of litter. They effectively refuse to.
Somewhere along the line, the notion that 'We're all in this together' has been flushed.
To be continued...
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